In October 1943 the Dayton Daily News ran a short, unsigned article on page eight welcoming a group of young Japanese American college graduates to the city. Read quickly, it is a kind local story. Read the way a historian reads it, it raises questions the article never answers: why were they in Dayton, why did the paper feel the need to vouch for them, and why was it buried inside the paper? The National Park Service's Talking with the Past series walks through exactly that kind of reading, one primary source at a time.
Six questions for any source
The series works from six elements a historian asks of every document: origin, perspective, context, audience, purpose and meaning — who made it and what kind of thing it is, from what point of view, in what circumstances, for whom, why, and what it says once all of that is taken into account.
| Source | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Newspaper article | whose voice it is (an unsigned piece is either a wire story, usually labelled, or the paper's own), the paper's editorial leaning, word choice, and where it sits in the paper |
| Oral history | the context and background of the person speaking, and what their memory emphasises or leaves out |
| Propaganda poster | where the eye goes first, what the text is shouting, who issued it, and the small print |
The newspaper
The Dayton article has no author, so the first job is to work out whose perspective it carries. Consulting historian Alison Russell looks up the paper's ownership and editorial leaning and reads the word choices against it: the article stresses that the newcomers are graduates of American colleges — respectable, and American. Then comes context. In 1943 these young people had been forcibly removed from their homes on the West Coast under Executive Order 9066, and they were now being resettled, without their families, in the Midwest. That the story ran on page eight says the paper judged it minor, and invites the next question: were they there for the war effort, in a city that was a production hub?
Perspective is not the same as bias to be thrown away. Every source has a point of view; it shapes what is and is not included, and it is itself evidence.
The interview
In the oral history episode, Sarah Lane reads an interview with Marcella Irene Martin, who describes pollution in wartime Pittsburgh and how it bore on her recruitment work. The method: read the context and the interviewee's background first, then check the content against what else is known. Oral histories, as the series puts it, bring together a love of stories and the study of history — without the cursive handwriting.
The posters
Marjorie Antonio reads two home-front posters as persuasion. United We Win puts an American flag in colour over black-and-white photographs of two men at work, and the credit in the corner — "OWI photo by Lieberman", "OWI poster number 38" — tells you it came from the Office of War Information, a government campaign produced in a numbered series. Victory Waits on Your Fingers was produced by the Royal Typewriter Company for the U.S. Civil Service Commission, recruiting typists: a company and an agency with overlapping purposes, speaking to the same audience.
Sources
Written from the National Park Service's Talking with the Past: Explorations in Source Analysis and Media Literacy (Teaching with Historic Places), a work of the United States government in the public domain. The episodes are presented by Alyssa Eveland with Alison Russell, Sarah Lane and Marjorie Antonio.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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